Trauma as a social and cultural category: history research.

Abstract

“Trauma studies” studies since the 1990-th is the rapidly developing method in literature studies, it became one of the ways of nominalization, telling about events painful and closed from a transparent articulation and demonstration – both macroand microhistoric events. Concepts such as “evidence”, “post-traumatic stress disorder”, “historical trauma”, introduced by Sh. Felman and D. Laub and then tested by their followers, became the object of attention of psychologists, cultural scientists, historians, literary critics. Due to the heterogeneity of analytical optics, “trauma studies” quickly evolved into a relatively independent branch of the humanities. For post-totalitarian and post-genocidal Ukrainian society whose history evidenced a lot of historical traumas during the twentieth century, representation and perception of its experience became a serious social and scientific challenge. So putting categories of injury in modern study means nothing but an attempt to overcome the historical amnesia and attempts to restore the cultural integrity of the individual and the full national self-affirmation. Separation of the “trauma studies” as an independent branch of humanities in 1990-th was based on J. Lacan’s statement of need to return to S. Freud. Long before determining and fixing the traumatic nature of nervous disorders S. Freud distinguished mental illness, which he called “war neurosis”. This problem is sounds especially relevant now, in the context of inheritance by nations of historical memory about the catastrophes, the integration of negative elements in the psychology of the past, present and future generations. It seems to the author as self-evident that attempts to articulate and treat of post-traumatic consciousness is impossible without revisions of both macro- and microhistoric disasters, and therefore – without painful stories of trauma. Therefore, the implementation of trauma analysis, “trauma studies” as a universal key to the reading of Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century in the space of contemporary literary enables talk and interpretation of “traumatic places” in national culture and consciousness.